How to pick up American Accent?

Identify the primary syllable in a word and speak the syllable longer than other syllables in the word:

  What is a syllable? Syllable is a basic unit of speech which has one vowel sound. For example, the world ‘he’ has one syllable. The word ‘vowel’ has two syllables. (Vo-wel). The word ‘transaction’ has three syllables(tran-sac-tion).

Now I know what a syllable is.  How do I divide a word with syllables?

         If there is one consonant follows the vowel , then the consonant will go with next vowel.

         Example: gi-ve, to-tal, po-wer, de-sert, da-ta

         If there are two consonants following a vowel, then divide the word between the two     

         consonant.

         Example: con-tent, com-pany, ef-fect,, per-fect, con-tent

         More Examples:

         ad-jec-tive, mes-sa-ge, in-sti-tu-tion, or-ga-ni-za-tion, es-tab-lish-ment, e-co-no-my,

         en-vi-ron-ment, com-pu-ter, de-li-very, prac-ti-cal, vir-tu-al

Now we need to know which syllable is stressed.

    Two syllable words:

        If the word is a noun, adjective or compound noun, the first syllable is stressed.

        Example: da-ta, pro-ject, ser-vice, pro-gram,

        If the word is a verb, preposition or compound verb, the second syllable is stressed.

        Example: con-firm, con-vey, trans-fer,

   Three and More syllable words:

       Words ending with –ion, -ic, -ment: syllable that comes before the suffix

        Example: in-sti-tu-tion, des-crip-tion, de-ci-sion, ag-ree-ment, prob-le-ma-tic, mag-ne-tic

There are too many rules on which syllable is stressed in a word. You need not learn all the rules. Instead, you can listen to native American English speaker. Or you can watch American channels in TV. 

Stress the content words in a sentence and not the functional words in the sentence:

         I went to the library

         I created an android application.

In the sentences above, the content words are in bold. Nouns, verb, adjectives and adverbs are considered as Content words. Pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions are considered as functional words, which are not stressed or unheard most of the time.

There is something called long vowel sound and short vowel sound:

 If there are two vowels adjacent, then the first vowel is long and the second one is silent

Example: read, weird, broad,

If a vowel is followed by consonants, then the vowel is short.

Example: short, chart,

Schwa sound:

 The vowel in the unstressed syllable is pronounced as ‘uh’ or ‘er’ instead of its long or short sound

Ex: Doctor, Director, alarm, agree, dinesaur

I hope the above tips would help you to start practicing American accent . I am not an expert in American Accent. I am also like you trying to speak better English.

Thanks for reading my blog.